And on that rather inconclusive note, I leave you. Christmas will soon be upon us, and you will be tied up with family matters. However, I hope very much that we can consult with each other in the New Year.
In the meantime, I am your obedient servant and friend.
Malcolm Buswell
46
A hidden life
Jo rereads Malcolm’s letter for the third time. Parts of it make her smile, while other passages worry her. How on earth can they help Reverend Ruth? Especially as she hasn’t confided in them.
She rereads the letter for the fourth time, then stares out of her bedroom window at the skyline – an angular edge of moorland dusted with snow. It is an hour later, when the afternoon light is fading and the ridge of snow has finally merged into the creeping darkness, when she eventually comes up with a plan. She thinks of Lucy briefly. Hadn’t she said that Jo was the one who came up with ideas?
Well, she has had an idea.
She reaches for her laptop and sends an email to the shy but charming curate, Angela Green.
Jo has decided to go to the carolservice with her mum. There are three reasons for this. Firstly her mum asked her to; secondly she feels in some way it may help her connect with Ruth (she even wonders if there might be a candle she could light for her), and thirdly it will stop her checking her email every few minutes in the hope of seeing what Angela thinks of her idea.
The service is beautiful and the church packed. Jo knows many of the faces and is warmed by the smattering of friendly greetings. The glow from the candlelight brings back memories of standing in the bus shelter watching the windows of another church slowly fill with light. The children sing a special carol that makes her smile, and the soaring descant of the church choir brings her close to tears, as she thinks of her favourite uncle. Watching the children dressed in tea towels and dressing gowns act out a scene from the Nativity, she knows more than ever she wants her own family. But it comes to her that Uncle Wilbur didn’t have children and yet he still forged a special relationship with his niece. He still had family. And soon she will be ‘Auntie Jo’ to Lucy and Sanjeev’s baby. Maybe this could be enough? As the service comes to a close, she finds comfort in the retelling of the Christmas tale and happily breathes in the scent of pine needles and polish, reliving her time in a small shop in North London.
But despite all this, she still cannot shake off the feeling that she is a fraud. However much she admires Ruth’s calling, the truth is that she can’t persuade herself to believe. Faith is more elusive than that – not simply a judgement a person can choose to make.
As she leaves the church, with her arm tucked comfortably in her mother’s, she acknowledges that the Highgate Cemetery ghosts are more real to her than an all-seeing, all-knowing God.
Now, back home, she helps her mum with supper. They are going to have local cheeses, with her mum’s homemade bread, sitting by the fire. Her dad has already poured the red wine.
Supper ready, her parents settle down to watchIt’s a Wonderful Life, one of the few Christmas films that her mum can persuade her father to watch. Jo checks her phone for the tenth time. This time thereisan email from Angela. It is a long one.
She rushes upstairs to collect her laptop and spends the rest of the evening, curled up on the sofa, typing and scrolling through various sites. At intervals she reaches for another chocolate from the china bowl on the coffee table, and sends links to Angela, who she gathers is already in bed, her dog, Betty, resting on her feet.
It is past midnight when she finishes and shuts her laptop. Her parents have disappeared upstairs long ago, and the sitting room is now lit solely by firelight and Christmas tree lights. Standing up and stretching, Jo picks up her half-empty glass of red wine and walks over to the French windows. She pulls back the long moss-green curtains and stares out through the glass.
She can see a crescent moon, bright in a pitch sky. The lawn is glistening with frost, and the cold flowing through the glass turns her breath to mist. Unlocking the door, she steps outside. Hugging her jumper closely to her, she steps onto the lawn. Her footprints dot the grass as she picks her way towards the flowerbed where her mother’s roses grow. The plants are sharp spikes in the moonlight, the earth underneath like charcoal and ash. Looking up at the moon, she tips some wine onto the soil, and silently asks the gods for their help.
The gods have been busy. The forum that Jo and Angela have set up for people to leave their Christmas wishes for Reverend Ruth is already full of posts. And as Jo hoped, people haven’t just sent Seasons Greetings; it is clear they want to thank Ruth for all she has done for them.
Jo does a quick scan. She and Angela agreed on strict moderation, and should Colin Will-kill-soon feel the need to post anything, they have decided that he will very quickly be deleted. She and Angela didn’t need to worry. There are nothing but positive comments. It seems the inhabitants of her parish are welcoming the chance to tell Ruth what a difference she made. As Jo scrolls down, more and more comments are added.
An email pops into her inbox from Angela with the title:Have you seen this?!
There is nothing in the content except for exclamation marks and smiley faces. Jo really hopes she gets to meet Angela Green one day. And her dog, Betty.
So many stories of kindness emerge from the various posts. There are good wishes from people that Ruth visited when they were sick or bereaved. There is a note from Josh’s parents: since a baby, their son has been seriously ill and in and out of hospital, ‘Like a yoyo.’ All through this, Ruth visited them, bottle in hand.
Drink is mentioned quite a lot: George recalls sharing a nip of whisky with her on his allotment when his wife June died; Gina, a teaching assistant who was made redundant, remembers Prosecco; and Joyce and Martin, whose dog was run over, recalled the three of them toasting ‘Archie’ with a nice Amontillado (Ruth had also said a prayer over his grave by the weeping willow).
A builder from an outlying hamlet thanks Ruth for conducting such a special wedding service for his daughter (and then adds a note to say he is available for extensions and conservatories). This seems to stimulate a rush of good wishes and thanks for weddings, christenings and funerals. Jo finds the funeral posts the most touching, as it is clear that Reverend Ruth spent a lot of time with the dying and their families. And also that she remembers anniversaries of deaths as well. Bottles of wine are mentioned here too.
A former asylum seeker, now a pharmacist working in Birmingham (Jo sends silent thanks to Angela for having spread the word so successfully), writes about how, when he arrived here from Afghanistan and had poor English, no one would believe he was an educated man. But Ruth took him in and let him stay in the vicarage for several weeks. Jo wonders what Churchwarden Colin had to say about that – she suspects quite a lot.
Soon it becomes obvious that word is out in the local school. There is a flurry of posts wishing Reverend Ruth a Happy Christmas (with lots of emojis). Quite a few mention her ‘noisy prayer’ which, if the emojis are anything to go by, involved thanking God by bouncing up and down and shouting the words out very loudly. Jenny thanks Ruth for presenting her with first prize in the school’s poetry competition, and Amir thanks her for telling him, when he didn’t win, that footballers earn more money anyway.
A screenwriter posts very movingly of his wife’s suicide, and an anonymous couple of their son’s battle with drugs and eventual overdose. Jo wonders if this is the couple that Ruth had told her about, whose son, Paul, had been found dead in their garden. In both these messages, Ruth is thanked for talking about the wife, the son when others wouldn’t, for fear of upsetting them. Jo recalls Ruth’s directness and, not for the first time, thinks how her openness offers a form of relief.
There are also smaller kindnesses mentioned, acts that would not cause so much as a ripple in the local news. Ruth putting her neighbour’s bins out when he had broken an ankle; helping a woman called Jill deal with scam phone calls (Jo smiles at the memory of Ruth dealing with just such a call in her shop), and walking Brendan’s Alsatian, Maximillian, when Brendan was recovering from his hernia operation. The captain of a local hockey team posts about how Ruth often came along to cheer them on (and on one occasion took one of their midfielders to A&E). All these people want to send their love to the Reverend Ruth Hamilton at Christmas. And more posts keep popping up on Jo’s screen.
Jo sends a quick email to Angela asking her if she wants to let Ruth know what they have done. Then she texts Malcolm with a link to the forum.
